Ironhorse

Acknowledgments

Much obliged to G. P. Putnam’s Sons’ president, Ivan Held, for getting this night train out of the depot, and to all my rough and ready compadres for stepping aboard in the storm: Reeder Railroad’s head honcho, Richard Grigsby (without him we’d surely have run out of steam); telegraph operator Roger Reinke; tracker Jamie “Whatnot” Whitcomb; gunsmith Keith Walters; wrangler Rex Peterson; the Oklahoma Historical Society’s Larry O’Dell and Jeff Moore; my ex-oil field pard’, Lowell Reed; mountain guide Rob Wood of Rancho Roberto; mechanical chieftain Jim Timplin; and Ed Harris, the extraordinary man who so expertly brought Robert B. Parker’s Virgil Cole to life on the silver screen: “Feelings get you killed.”

My deepest sympathy to all the beguiled and besieged who stoked this engine as it struggled upgrade into the mountains: Alison Binder, Josh Kesselman, Jayne Amelia Larson, Kathy Toppino, Alice DiGregorio, Chet Burns, Carol Beggy, Ginger Sledge, Lt. Col. Charles Austin, Minda Gowen, Lisa Todd, Mike Watson, my sisters — the Clogging Castanets — Sandra Hakman and Karen Austin, Grant Hubley, Rex Linn, Kevin Meyer, Corby Griesenbeck, them damned kids Gabriel and Vanessa, Julie Rose (the brightest light on the track), and to Michael Marantz, who is up there somewhere chewing the fat with a rustler’s moon.

Muchas gracias to Michael Brandman and Ace Atkins, for jumping off the trestle and into swift Parker waters before me, and to Helen Brann, for shoving me off to follow and shouting, “Cannonball!” After I touched mud and came to the surface, a gasping holler went out to my editor extraordinaire, Chris Pepe, and her faithful fireman, Meaghan Wagner, for keeping me from drowning with my boots on.

And a GRAND BLAST OF THE WHISTLE to the notorious Parker clan, Joan, David and Daniel, for issuing a warrant for me to saddle up and ride where no other hombre has ever rode... and last, to Robert B. Parker, for allowing all of us, with the tap of a spinning spur, the opportunity to continue our gallop over the rails and across the open plains.